Mike Ross: If City Hall won't build a school for Back Bay/Beacon Hill, use empty space in City Hall

In the LOOOOOONG discussion between Stevil and myself, I believe that I proved my point on the facts: parents of school age children who live in Back Bay and Beacon hill are no more geographically inconvenienced than parents in other parts of the city.

That said, I'll tell you why I support a new public elementary school in Back Bay or Beacon Hill.

Busing was instituted in order to desegregate Boston public schools. In that regard, it has been a dismal failure. Boston area schools today are more segregated than they were in the sixties. A majority of white, middle-class people refuse to send their children to Boston Public Schools, opting instead either to move to suburbs or send their children to private or parochial schools. It is mostly people who don't have the means or the motivation to do this who send their kids to the free public schools. The result is that many public schools are today almost entirely racially segregated, with 99% Black and Hispanic kids, whereas some suburban or private schools are almost entirely segregated the other way. When I talked to an admissions director at one of the area's finest private schools, she said they like to admit minority students in pairs "so they won't get lonely."

Segregating the public schools away from the public at large (as Boston is almost 50% white, and only 15% of families are in poverty), reducing the diversity in the public schools until they are just for a certain sector of society, is a recipe for not just the educational impoverishment of the children attending, but for reduction in political support for the schools in general. It is a vicious cycle.

I believe in the idea of public schools. And I believe that the single greatest threat to public schools is that people in power come to think of them as schools for other people's children, not their own children.

I know public school teachers in Boston who want to move to the suburbs so they don't have to send their own kids to middle school in Boston. Puerto Rican public school teachers. That's how bad it is - not how bad the schools are (most have excellent facilities and skilled teachers) - but how bad it is racially and socially. Very few middle class people, of any race, want to send their kids to a school that is entirely segregated. If school teachers won't send their kids to the public schools, if politicians won't, if business leaders won't, then their support for schools takes on the aspect of pity and obligation rather than engagement.

Boston should be doing everything it can to get white and middle-class kids back into the schools. This would be today's desegregation policy. Instead, school officials seem to be playing a cynical budget game, where they are happy with scaring people with means out of the schools because it means they have to spend their budget on fewer kids. But this is not a game you can play forever. At the same time that political support for the schools drops, the cost per child increases, with higher proportions of ESL, special needs, and kids in all sorts of trouble. Once you've scared off all the kids who are cheap to educate (check out how little it costs per student at Latin), your per-student cost goes up and up and up.

Boston should put a new elementary school in Back Bay or Beacon Hill not because there is greater need for it there. The density of children is low, and schools are as near to that population as they are to kids in West Roxbury or Mattapan. It's not because the kids need it. The Back Bay and Beacon Hill are full of rich, privileged adults and children, who have the means to go to private school. And that's why Boston should put a new elementary school there: so that these kids don't go to private school instead. Boston should want the kids who will grow up to be the movers and shakers in this town to feel a connection to, not alienation from, the public school system. Boston public schools should attempt to retain not just the poor and powerless who have nowhere else to go, but the middle-class and wealthy who have other options. Desegregating Boston Public Schools to better represent the city at large would improve the funding of the schools, it would improve the education at the schools, and it would improve the reputation of the schools. Boston schools should be schools of choice, and for people who have choices.

Building a new elementary school in Beacon Hill or the Back Bay would be a good step towards restoring the BPS system to its historic place as an educator of all children. For people in other, less privileged parts of Boston, it would send a message that our public schools are, and should be, good enough for everybody.

I can still see the logic, eeka. When you give taxes, part of the understanding is to help pay for services. One tend to feel jipped if one pays $20,000 in property taxes, enough to pay for private school education and instead see nothing from it directly. Granted, it is aimed at a people who can view $20,000 as something much less substantial, but $20,000 is still $20,000.